The first large-scale strike of the AI era comes from the factories that build AI

Original author: Sleepy

AI may redefine the future, but it still cannot pay for the dignity earned through labor.

On May 20, wage negotiations between Samsung Electronics and its labor union nearly reached a breaking point. The union had been preparing to launch an 18-day strike starting May 21. At the last moment, a tentative agreement was reached, putting the strike on hold pending a vote by union members. However, the real issues have not disappeared.

Strikes are not unfamiliar to us.

Those past events were equally heavy. Some occurred in old industrial bases, some in the automotive supply chain, and some in foreign trade factories propped up by cheap manual labor, with keywords always revolving around low wages and unpaid debts. Initially, people were treated as durable consumables, slotted into various plans under the banner of "the greater good." It was only when life was squeezed to the breaking point that people suddenly realized they hadn't yet degenerated into iron parts, and thus rose up from that cold order, making a noise that was distinctly human.

But this time is different.

This time, it is the workers of Samsung Electronics who have stepped forward.

They are not the workers left with no retreat in the tide of globalization. Instead, they are the group embedded deepest in the AI supply chain, closest to the "future." Within Samsung's vast chaebol machinery, this giant that holds the world's semiconductor lifeline is being pressed the pause button by its own workers.

A Strike That Threatens Global AI

This strike is precisely choking the throat of the global AI industry chain.

Samsung and SK Hynix together produce roughly two-thirds of the world's memory chips.

Memory chips have always been important, but were never considered a glamorous business. That changed with the arrival of AI, turning them into a fiercely contested battleground. Large model training, inference, and data center expansion require more than just GPUs; data must be fed in, stored, and retrieved at high speed, necessitating high-bandwidth memory like HBM.

According to KB Securities analyst Jeff Kim, an 18-day strike could disrupt 3% to 4% of global DRAM supply and 2% to 3% of NAND supply. While not apocalyptic, it is enough to tighten price expectations, customer production schedules, cloud vendor costs, and tech stock nerves.

The South Korean government is even more uneasy. Samsung is not just any company; it is a manifestation of South Korea's national strength.

Yonhap News reported that semiconductor exports account for about 35% of South Korea's total exports. In the first quarter of 2026, South Korea's exports reached a record high of $219.9 billion, with semiconductor exports surging 139% year-on-year to $78.5 billion.

Samsung itself accounts for about a quarter of the KOSPI's market capitalization. In other words, a tremor on Samsung's production line shakes not just one company's profit statement, but South Korea's exports, stock market, exchange rate expectations, and the nation's confidence in telling its story to the world.

More critically, AI arrived too suddenly. In the past, South Korea's narrative of being a tech powerhouse revolved around phones, displays, cars, home appliances, and semiconductors. Now, the global narrative has been reshuffled by large language models, with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, a cohort of Chinese LLM companies, and computing giants like Nvidia in the spotlight. South Korea naturally wants its own sovereign AI, and the government is pushing for national AI infrastructure. Nvidia has even announced plans to deploy over 260,000 AI chips in South Korea. But South Korea knows well that with models alone, it's difficult to exert overwhelming international influence squeezed between the US and China.

What it truly holds onto is the harder, heavier, less glamorous path: memory chips, HBM, DRAM, NAND, advanced manufacturing, and the underlying supply chain that feeds AI data centers. This is why Samsung is more important than ever today.

The further AI runs, the more the world realizes that large models aren't magic floating in the cloud. They need electricity, GPUs, and memory. South Korea may not change the world with a single model, but it can ensure that no model in the world can bypass its chips.

The AI industry typically likes to talk about computing power, models, the games of giants, and who has outmaneuvered whom.

The Samsung strike abruptly pulls everyone back from the clouds to the ground. No matter how high the computing power, it ultimately comes down to factories, shifts, bonus formulas, and labor-management negotiations.

The future isn't just floating in the clouds. The future also needs payroll.

Why Are They Striking?

The union's core demands include:

A 7% increase in base salary;

Allocating 15% of Samsung's annual operating profit to an employee bonus pool;

Abolishing the current bonus cap, which is about 50% of annual salary, and clearly defining how bonuses are calculated, when they are paid, and how they will be treated in the future.

Samsung disagrees. The company argues the union's demands are excessive, especially that extending generous bonuses to business divisions operating at a loss would break the "those who generate profit get higher bonuses" rule.

According to reports, a key point of contention during mediation was precisely the issue of profit-sharing between different business units within the semiconductor division. The memory business is profitable, while other units are under pressure or even loss-making. Should employees in loss-making units also receive large bonuses?

In modern large corporations, ordinary employees rarely negotiate pay directly with the boss. Money is embedded in seemingly objective metrics: performance, coefficients, costs, cycles, business units, profit margins, bonus caps.

Samsung's bonuses have long been tied to a complex formula, with Korean media frequently mentioning the term EVA. The gist is that profit must first deduct taxes, investments, and various capital costs before anything is left for bonuses. The financial logic is sound, but it's hard for people to accept. Employees don't understand: If the company's profit is rising, why isn't my bonus moving? Did I lose out due to my performance, or due to this formula? Does my sweat count as a contribution in the company's eyes?

The anger of Samsung employees has only erupted now because they have a mirror right beside them: SK Hynix.

SK Hynix secured an excellent position in the AI memory field, shining brightly in the HBM supply chain. More importantly, it knows how to convert this success into tangible numbers on employees' paychecks.

In September 2025, SK Hynix and its union agreed on new rules: for the next decade, the company will annually allocate 10% of its operating profit to employees, and abolished the existing bonus cap.

The JoongAng Ilbo reported at the time that under the new agreement, employees were expected to receive approximately 100 million won (about $75,000 USD) in bonuses per person that year. By early 2026, the Seoul Economic Daily reported based on the company's 2025 performance that approximately 34,500 SK Hynix employees would receive performance bonuses averaging 140 million won (about $105,000 USD).

More strikingly, the Seoul Economic Daily, citing FnGuide projections, reported that SK Hynix's 2026 operating profit could reach 230.0885 trillion won. 10% translates to a bonus pool of about 23 trillion won. Dividing this by 34,549 employees yields an average of about 670 million won (approximately $500,000 USD) per person.

SK Hynix has already put the meat on the table. When Samsung employees hear the company talking about EVA, capital costs, and departmental differences, of course they get angry.

Samsung's official financial report shows that in the first quarter of 2026, the company's consolidated revenue reached 133.9 trillion won, a record quarterly high; operating profit reached 57.2 trillion won. The semiconductor division's Q1 revenue was 81.7 trillion won, with an operating profit of 53.7 trillion won. The profits are primarily driven by AI-related demand, such as high-value AI memory, rising industry memory prices, HBM4, and AI data center expansion.

This is where the awkwardness lies.

When a company is losing money, employees hold no cards. Bosses urge everyone to endure, saying the cycle will turn. Workers may not be convinced, but since there's no visible profit, they let it go. But when the company becomes prosperous again and the feast is truly on the table, who gets to eat, who sits at the head, and who just stands by smelling the scraps – this can no longer be glossed over with emotional appeals.

The Root of the Problem

To understand why Samsung employees are so angry today, you can't just look at a pay stub. You have to look back at the long-tensed line between Korea's chaebols and its workers.

South Korea's modernization process was more like a forced march led by the state. Large companies were pulled to the forefront, while workers followed silently. This vehicle ran extremely fast, but the allocation of seats was never decided by people sitting down to discuss it.

Post-war Korea was impoverished. From the Park Chung-hee era, the state became the general manager of industrialization, pouring support into chaebols to win orders, build factories, and catch up on technology. Names like Samsung, Hyundai, and SK became the nation's face. They were designated as standard-bearers who *had* to win because Korea needed that victory. To achieve this, the state provided resources, banks provided loans, and society provided endless endurance, while the factory floor operated under ironclad discipline.

In this system, the role of the worker was clear: first, build the nation; first, make the company big; first, endure. Wages could come later, rights could come later, unions could come later, and dignity could be compromised for now. Don't ask about seat comfort before the vehicle has even started moving.

1987 was a watershed moment. The monolithic order cracked, and workers streamed out of the factories through the fissures. Unions in large companies began to take root. Workers were no longer willing to be a vague backdrop in grand narratives like the "economic miracle." They stepped onto the stage, demanding wages, demanding safety, and demanding to be seen as living creators, not as worn-out parts to be discarded.

But Samsung was a long-standing exception. Samsung's "no-union management" was a deeply entrenched part of its corporate culture. In 2019, Samsung executives and employees were implicated in interfering with and obstructing legitimate union activities. Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Sang-hoon was imprisoned for union-busting activities. In 2020, Lee Jae-yong publicly apologized and pledged to abolish this old practice, finally cracking Samsung's iron curtain.

So, this strike is not abrupt. It is rooted in post-war Korean industrialization, the old ways of the chaebols, the labor movements after 1987, Samsung's long tradition of being union-free, and the belated apology of 2020.

The most hurtful part of this whole affair isn't the money. It's that some capitalists are only willing to "share hardship" but not "enjoy prosperity."

When a company is struggling, employees are often told to be like a family. When the company is profitable, employees are reminded that it is a business. The first statement appeals to emotion, the second to system. The problem is, people have emotions not just during hard times.

Writing this, it's no longer just a Korean story.

"Weathering the storm together," "reducing costs and increasing efficiency," "improving quality and efficiency," "embracing AI," "enhancing labor productivity," "optimizing costs" – these are phrases we are all too familiar with now.

This might be the most undignified aspect of the AI era.

We thought AI would liberate people from labor. Instead, often people must cooperate with AI to save the company money; people must learn AI to make their departments more efficient; people must accept job restructuring, performance re-evaluation, and salary redefinition. As for the dividends, someone always tells you to wait, don't be impatient, the company still has to invest, do R&D, withstand cycles, and remain competitive.

These reasons might all be true. But the problem is, if they are always pushed in one direction, they become a very polished form of evasion. Many companies in reality work the same way: everyone makes the money together, but when it comes time to decide how to share it, you'd better not speak up.

Samsung workers are speaking up now.

But speaking up doesn't guarantee victory. The South Korean government may invoke emergency mediation, courts have already restricted some actions, and Samsung has complex production and legal tools at its disposal. A semiconductor fab is not a small workshop that can be shut down at will, and the union cannot stop such a precise system without cost. The real world isn't a fantasy novel; workers don't win so easily.

Snowpiercer

In Bong Joon-ho's *Snowpiercer*, humanity is crammed into a train that cannot stop.

The front is order, technology, and the future; the back is crowded, silent, and predetermined fate. The most caustic aspect of this story isn't that the carriages are forcibly stratified, but that everyone accepts a premise: the train must never stop.

As long as the train keeps moving forward, your suffering in whatever carriage, whether you eat cockroaches or not, all becomes a "necessary cost" for maintaining the system's operation. For the sake of that grand motive, living individuals always seem expendable.

The Samsung strike is similarly trapped on a train that "cannot stop."

Wafers must not be damaged. Production lines must not stall. AI servers must not wait. South Korea's export data must not fall. Global tech companies don't want memory chip prices pushed higher. Every reason is undeniably correct and spoken with conviction. From the standpoint of the national economy, Samsung cannot stop. Against the ledger of the global supply chain, Samsung cannot stop. In the still-undecided AI race, Samsung absolutely must not stop.

The more a machine is forbidden from stopping, the more its internal components are asked to endure.

Endure the production line. Endure the cycle. Endure the performance review. Endure the corporate strategy. Endure the global competition. Endure until, finally, you realize you are always making way for something bigger. Big for the company. Big for the industry. Big for the future.

Ordinary people's lives seem very small in the face of these grand terms, small like a screw. But even a screw has its own metal fatigue.

What the Samsung union is doing this time does not overturn the benefits AI brings to the world, nor does it deny the semiconductor industry, nor does it say technological progress is unimportant.

This isn't the old story of the poor revolting against the rich, nor is it a small story about high-paid employees trying to get a bigger bonus share.

It actually touches on a deeply unsettling proposition of the AI era: As technology becomes more advanced, will labor become more silent? As machines become more powerful, is the bargaining power of ordinary people destined to shrink? As growth becomes more dazzling, will the stability of our lives become weaker?

We love talking about the future, and the word "future" is indeed useful. It acts like a high-wattage spotlight, illuminating blueprints at launches, ambitions in funding plans, and fluctuating company market caps. But the future cannot only light up the front of the train. It also needs to move back, to shine on grueling night shifts, ID badges, the resumes of fresh graduates, and those who are constantly told to "embrace change" but shown the door when the good fruits are being divided.

The Samsung strike will likely end with compromise, arbitration, partial concessions, or a new bonus formula. Labor disputes often go this way: starting with a bang and ending with a set of ratios, a paper agreement, and a few cautiously worded press releases. News cycles will move on, stock prices will keep fluctuating, AI companies will release new models, and servers will consume more chips.

But some questions will not be cleared away with the negotiation table.

The most pressing questions of the AI era are not just about how strong the computing power is, how fast the models are, or how expensive the chips are. We need to ponder whether those who personally dragged the "future" into reality will eventually be able to share in a stable life from that future.

This statement doesn't sound grand, but what ordinary people want is inherently not grand. It's simply meaningful work, fair compensation, a hopeful life, and the assurance that when the times take a sharp turn, they won't be easily shaken off.

Of course, the future must move forward. But a train truly heading toward the future cannot have only its front car illuminated.